Recollections Of The End Of An Era

Jerzy Einhorn was born the year that Poland gained independence after 123 years of partition and occupation by Austria, Germany and Russia. This was a happy time in Poland's troubled history and the author recalls the activities and friendships of a carefree childhood. As the years pass, dark clouds appear on Poland's western border. Jerzy enters a military academy and, two years later, on the eve of the German invasion, he is called up for active duty in the 78th Light Horse Artillery. Following the Battle of Warsaw in September 1939, the young lieutenant becomes a member of the AK (underground Home Army) where he works in counter-intelligence. In spite of his Jewish origins, he survives the occupation and, in 1944, fights in the Warsaw Uprising. Jerzy Einhorn relates his many experiences, some personal and some involving great risk and courage, during the tumultous years of World War II, a war which brought to an end a period of peace and liberty for all Poles.

In this volume of biographical essays, all vividly written, extensively researched, Charles L. Dufour recounts the lives of nine Confederate officers, who served their cause with dedication, skill and bravery. “Porter Alexander is not a household name today, but he should be remembered as one of Robert E. Lee’s most valuable officers. Bold and imaginative, Alexander was an artillerist whose service was requested by every Confederate army commander. He and eight other “men in gray” come to life in vivid sketches by Charles L. Dufour. Singled out are Dick Taylor, the handsome son of former president Zachary Taylor who led the Louisiana Brigade; Turner Ashby, an expert horseman whose death in battle typified the doomed gallantry of the Rebels; Pat Cleburne of the Army of Tennessee, who was called “the Stonewall of the West”; “Savez” Read, a navy man who terrorized the Atlantic seaboard in a one-gun sailing vessel; Willie Pegram, a shy Virginian who was a bold cannoneer; Lucius B. Northrop, whose abrasive personality complicated his task of feeding the army; William Mahone, whose ferocious fighting spirit belied his bantam size; and Henry Hotze, who served brilliantly as a Confederate agent and propagandist.”-Print ed.

Ambrose Burnside, the Union general, was a major player on the Civil War stage from the first clash at Bull Run until the final summer of the war. He led a corps or army during most of this time and played important roles in various theaters of the war. But until now, he has been remembered mostly for his distinctive side-whiskers that gave us the term "sideburns" and as an incompetent leader who threw away thousands of lives in the bloody battle of Fredericksburg. In a biography focusing on the Civil War years, William Marvel reveals a more capable Burnside who managed to acquit himself creditably as a man and a soldier. Along the Carolina coast in 1862, Burnside won victories that catapulted him to fame. In that same year, he commanded a corps at Antietam and the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg. In East Tennessee in the summer and fall of 1863, he captured Knoxville, thereby fulfilling one of Lincoln's fondest dreams. Back in Virginia during the spring and summer of 1864, he once again led a corps at the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. But after the fiasco of the Crater he was denied another assignment, and he resigned from the army the day that Lincoln was assassinated. Marvel challenges the traditional evaluation of Burnside as a nice man who failed badly as a general. Marvel's extensive research indicates that Burnside was often the scapegoat of his superiors and his junior officers and that William B. Franklin deserves a large share of the blame for the Federal defeat at Fredericksburg. He suggests that Burnside's Tennessee campaign of 1863 contained much praiseworthy effort and shows during the Overland campaign from the Wilderness to Petersburg, and at the battle of the Crater, Burnside consistently suffered slights from junior officers who were confident that they could get away with almost any slur against "Old Burn." Although Burnside's performance included an occasional lapse, Marvel argues that he deserved far better treatment than he has received from his peers and subsequently from historians.

Eleven battles and seventy-three skirmishes were fought in North Carolina during the Civil War. Although the number of men involved in many of these engagements was comparatively small, the campaigns and battles themselves were crucial in the grand strategy of the conflict and involved some of the most famous generals of the war. John Barrett presents the complete story of military engagements across the state, including the classical pitched battle of Bentonville, the siege of Fort Fisher, the amphibious campaigns on the coast, and cavalry sweeps such as Stoneman's raid. From and through North Carolina, men and supplies went to Lee's army in Virginia, making the Tar Heel state critical to Lee's ability to remain in the field during the closing months of the war, when the Union had cut off the West and Gulf South. This dependence upon North Carolina led to Stoneman's cavalry raid and Sherman's march through the state in 1865, the latter of which brought the horrors of total war and eventual defeat.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, North and South quickly saw the need to develop the latest technology in naval warfare, the ironclad ship. After a year-long scramble to finish first, in a race filled with intrigue and second guessing, blundering and genius, the two ships -- the Monitor and the Merrimack -- after a four-hour battle, ended the three-thousand-year tradition of wooden men-of-war and ushered in "the reign of iron." In the first major work on the subject in thirty-five years, novelist, historian, and tall-ship sailor James L. Nelson, acclaimed author of the Brethren of the Coast trilogy, brilliantly recounts the story of these magnificent ships, the men who built and fought them, and the extraordinary battle that made them legend.

Robert E. Lee offers both a succinct biography and "the" definitive collection of nearly 350 photographs, important paintings, original engravings, artifacts, and significant documents pertaining to the Confederate general. Although the Civil War years are emphasized, Lee's early years, the Mexican War, and the postwar years in Lexington are amply explored.

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent, from the author of Orwell's Roses In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves; the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean; and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. Beyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced--and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.